Monday, 1 August 2016

Book Review: Draculas by Jack Kilborn and friends

A DYING MAN’S GREATEST TREASURE…

Mortimer
Moorecook, retired Wall Street raider, avid collector, is losing his
fight against cancer. With weeks to live, a package arrives at the door
of his hillside mansion—an artifact he paid millions for…a hominoid
skull with elongated teeth, discovered in a farmer’s field in the
Romanian countryside. With Shanna, his beautiful research assistant
looking on, he sinks the skull’s razor sharp fangs into his neck, and
immediately goes into convulsions.

OPENS THE DOOR TO AN ANCIENT EVIL...

A rural hospital. A slow night in the ER. Until Moorecook arrives strapped to a gurney, where he promptly codes and dies.

WHERE DEATH IS JUST THE BEGINNING.

Four well-known horror
authors(Jack Kilborn, Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand and F Paul Wilson) pool their penchants for scares and thrills, and tackle one of
the greatest of all legends, with each writer creating a unique
character and following them through a vampire outbreak in a secluded
hospital.

The goal was simple: write the most intense novel they possibly could. Which they did.

A Word of Warning:Within
these pages, you will find no black capes, no satin-lined coffins, no
brooding heartthrobs who want to talk about your feelings. Forget
sunlight and stakes. Throw out your garlic and your crosses. This is the
Anti-TWILIGHT.

My Review:

I always get nervous when I see authors getting together to
co-write a book, especially four! I always wonder if the styles and
ideas of the authors are going to clash and turn it into a pure mess.
But my fears were unfounded as soon as I got into this book.

It
starts with a bang and goes on at breakneck speed in an orgy of violence
and gore, with some pretty funny bits as well. Each author-Jack
Kilborn, Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand and F Paul Wilson, create characters
who are inside the secluded hospital when a vampire outbreak begins.
There are no fluffy bunny moments or a break in the action, no waffle or
endless descriptions, no classic literature or critically acclaimed
writing...this is just vampire action on speed. And I loved it!

Mortimor
is a rich man who is dying of cancer and has an extreme idea to cure
it. He purchases a vampire skull with horrific fangs and stabs himself
in the neck with it, infecting himself. His collapse is immediate and
his nurse Jenny and assistant Shanna have to get him to the hospital
where he swiftly dies. But Mortimor is going to come back very quickly
and is very hungry and eager to infect as many people as he can. Chaos
and death are about to reign in the hospital as the uninfected try to
escape or hide and the vampire hordes hunt them down.

We follow
Jenny and her ex husband Randall who is in hospital after an unfortunate
chainsaw accident, the obnoxious Dr Lanz who had Jenny fired from the
hospital, Shanna and her redneck cop boyfriend Clay, Adam in the labour
ward with wife Stacie, Benny the Clown at the ER after being bitten by a
child at a birthday party who is stuck to him by the braces on her
teeth and Carla the nurse on the labour ward. There are also a lot of
people at the hospital for various reasons who are about to become a
walking and screaming buffet!

It is Lanz who manages to get a
call in to the police to alert them while all hell is breaking out
around him. Victims are growing fangs as their own fall out, the sign of
infection, and a full scale bitefest is under way. Hospital staff are
trying to close wards and protect the vulnerable patients as monsters
stalk the dark corridors. Shanna comes back from a coffee to find
Mortimor had died, reanimated and is chewing on people. Benny the Clown
discovers that being chomped by a child is going to be the start of a
really bad day. Jenny begins to see the now sober Randall in a new light
as the injured man uses his chainsaw to protect her and a ward full of
kids. Oasis is discovering that being a child vampire makes it kinda
tough to get a decent meal. Adam's wife needs blood after the delivery
but does he really want to venture down to the basement to get it?

As
well as the gore, then is some seriously inappropriate humour which I
really enjoyed. Without a doubt, my favourite character was Benny the
Clown with his squeaky shoes. As he arrives on the children's ward where
others are hiding...

"Benny the Clown had torn open the man's
abdominal cavity, his claws cradling several loops of glistening
intestines. But rather than gorging on them, the clown was stretching
and pulling the bloody loops, twisting the organ into knots. Familiar
knots. 'Is that...a flamingo?' asked the old woman."

LOL! I
was laughing when I read that! Comedy and horror are great when put
together well, like in Evil Dead 2, and that was one of the highlights
in this book. It was so refreshing to read a book where the death toll
gives 24 a run for it's money, where the plot is just a crazy bloodbath
and where you are totally entertained from start to finish.

If you like gory horror with a few chuckles in it which is not to be taken seriously, then Draculas is for you!

6 comments:

Glad you liked it. I stumbled on a copy about 4 years ago and loved it. Just a crazy, over-the-top romp through what felt like a B-grade 80s gore-fest. There's been talk of a sequel, but I haven't seen any updates in the last year or so.

I'm glad you liked this because I'm pretty sure I grabbed it for my Kindle when you hauled it a while ago. It sounds like a great mixture and now I am bumping it up on my reading list. I want to do an "Ominous October" reading list and this is going right to the top!

It feels like ages since I read it! It's taken me a while to get round to some of these reviews but I hope to be catching up through the summer. I like the idea of your October list and will watch for that!

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